The driverless Car

The car of the future will be a driverless car. Computers will take over your driver duty and it is only a matter of time before these computers drive better than you.

Many people will object. We know computers and software are all but perfect. Can they guarantee us that no accidents will happen? No. We could, however, build a system that is quite safer than what we have today.

The advantages are important:

1. We avoid the human factor in accidents: fatigue, foolhardiness, aggression, lack of experience, alcohol abuse.
2. We drive the vehicles closer together so that the road capacity increases. Less traffic jams is good for the environment.
3. We can reduce the dependency of people who don't have a driver's license. We would theoretically no longer need to bring them where they need to be. 
4. We would have more time to do something else than driving.

Think how much lives we could save. Could we trust a machine? We do this all the time, when we take a train or a plane.

There are some psychological challenges to this. Many people believe they are good drivers; other people are dangerous. That is why other people seem to have accidents, and "we" never have an accident. Many people believe they will be better off without computers. Still they will be wrong in the long term. Driverless cars will come some day.

I also refer to my blog: "Cars, ships, trains and planes connected".

Picture: Yauhen_D / Shutterstock.com